IT IS NOW THE BUTTGEM. WE WILL ONLY RELEASE IT FOR ONE MILLION COSBYCOINS, ASSOCIATION WITH KIM DOTCOM, AND ONE MOVIE THEATER SERVING 20 VARIETIES OF SODA AND SHOWING FAN-MADE EPISODES OF DISNEY’S “TALESPIN.”
IF YOU DO NOT MEET OUR DEMANDS, WE WILL DELETE THIS WALLET WITHOUT MAKING A BACKUP.
Following are dozens of quotes, mostly dredged from reddit and Bitcointalk.
Last night Tom from bASIC, “Next generation Bitcoin mining hardware” built in his garage, blew a gasket:
these type of threads are BULLSHIT
we have always honored our refund requests but a thread like this basically just kills my business
Ask yourself this question:
Do you want a nice friendly refund as we have been giving or do you want to completely put me out of business?
because if you completely put me out of business than you are going to have to come to NY to take me to small claims court.
ask yourself this question, do you really want to come to NY to take me to small claims court? or do you just want to wait your turn and quietly get your requested refund as hundreds of people already have. Keep with the mob mentality its only going to keep you separated from your money longer.
this thread is bad for anyone seeking a refund, and the mods need to take notice and remove threads such as this.
HELLO CUSTOMERS
this is not good for you. Please stop.im reporting this to the mods myself – I encourage others to do the same.
-Tom
This occurred throughout multiple threads on the Bitcointalk forums.
Things that should be correct but unfortunately are not:
I lost a buttload on my fake money, can the US government bail me out with real tax dollars?
Oh, the irony.
Back during the largest of the Bitcoin bubbles, and even to this day, the largest Bitcoin “exchange” is the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange (MtGOX,) a website where the vast majority of USD to Bitcoin transfers takes place and the largest Bitcoin “authority,” so to speak. To many, MtGOX was the hub for Bitcoin activity. It may still be. I’m not going to visit a website called the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange to find out.
As the price of Bitcoins was falling like a rock dropped from a burning zeppelin, MtGOX enacted various “walls” in an attempt to halt the precipitous fall in the “value” of Bitcions. These, of course, did not work, but it’s hilarious how those who screech to the heavens and back about removing central authorities from currency and babble on about fiat this and fiat that allowed and probably encouraged this occurrence. Let’s take a closer look at how the Magic the Gathering Online Exchange admins attempted to rig Bitcoin prices to save their investment:
Imagine, for a moment, that you’re terribly foolhardy and have spent real money on ten thousand Bitcoins. You take a moment to meander over to MtGOX to play Internet Day Trader with your fake money and find the following outstanding buy orders:
What this means is that you could sell your play money to other suckers for around $14.95. The first 180 Bitcoins would, of course, sell at the higher prices, but the vast majority will go for the lowest listed price. Someone out there believes for some misguided reason that Bitcoins are worth $14.95 and is willing to pay that for a lot of them.
Now let’s imagine that 30000 Bitcoin wall is no longer there:
You can sell your first 180 Bitcoins immediately for the prices above, but then you’re still stuck with 9,820 of the damned things that you no longer want because you’ve come to your senses and realized this was all a terrible idea and you want out. You’re stuck with them until someone else comes along and places an order to buy some, and if they’re smart (and some of them actually are, they’re busy scamming the rest of the Bitcoiners,) they will split their buy order into small batches, each with an increasingly lower price, screwing you out of whatever value everyone agrees your hashes and bits and whatnot have.
This happens in the real stock markets too, but the amount of large companies involved ensures that only the little day trading guy gets screwed while the market itself doesn’t melt down. Large standing buy orders help to stabilize prices and without them one would see the hilarious roller coaster prices that Bitcoin is prone to having.
Now that we know all this, we can look at MtGOX when Bitcoin prices were tanking and see that in our above example, you wouldn’t have actually been able to sell at $14.95, because the 30,000 Bitcoin order was a fake wall and the moment the orders at $15.52 were fulfilled, the orders at $14.95 would disappear and quickly be replaced by another at a lower price. This happened numerous times and at any given time MtGOX’s market depth would show ten to fifty thousand Bitcoins’ worth of orders within one dollar of the current price. As the price plummeted, say by $3 within an hour, we would see that only Bitcoins in the volume of one to five thousand had been traded during that period of time, which would indicate that the large order had been pulled and replaced with another order for tens of thousands of Bitcoins just below the current price.
This happened over forty times during Bitcoin’s freefall from $20 to $5. The invisible hand of the free market at work!
Special thanks to SA forum goons Shifty Pony and I Greyhound for explaining all this garbage so I could paraphrase it here.
Make sure you have the subtitles turned on.
Last week the annual International CES was held in Las Vegas, Nevada, where consumer electronics manufacturers could display and demo thousands of iPhone cases and televisions. Somewhere amongst the unloved and unwanted entrepeneur projects, we found our Bitcoin friends shilling for Bitpay and Butterfly Labs, a “company” who has in the past manufactured FPGA mining rigs for the Bitcoin elite and now promise an even more efficient miner, containing ASICs, making it absolutely useless for anything aside from turning electricity into heat and play money.
Of course their delivery of said product has been hounded by delays and broken promises. Despite this, at CES BFL had an exciting new product to show off: a demo unit of one of their new FPGA miners!
As can clearly be seen here, it contains an Android tablet (a Nexus 7, to be exact) showing some sort of diagnostics or progress. Bitcoiners were understandably excited, they’ve been promised this machine for ages and its original ship date was to be some time in December. Those who have pre-ordered one of the expensive mining rigs could finally see what was in store for them. Before we get to that, let’s take a look at the booth on a busy day at CES:
It looks popular, right? In actuality, only three of these people are not employed by BFL, Bitpay, or otherwise involved with the booth. Can’t say this is terribly shocking.
Moving on, anybody who was the least bit observant could tell something was up with BFL’s demo. The tablet’s display didn’t change, leading to speculation that whatever it was showing was only a screenshot and that the device wasn’t functional. This was confirmed later on during the week:
This is an empty box made of fans. Enjoy these related upcoming Bitcoin products:
